Professor Thomas Lumley

Biography

I attended Monash University (B.Sc.(Hons) in Pure Mathematics), the University of Oxford (M.Sc. in Applied Statistics) and the University of Washington, Seattle (PhD in Biostatistics). I spent twelve years on the faculty of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington, and then moved to Auckland in 2010. I am still an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington.

Research | Current

My research interests include

• Semiparametric models
• Survey sampling
• Statistical computing
• Foundations of statistics
• and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with -- currently, multiple imputation on big datasets

Resources

• The survey package for R is a fairly comprehensive system for analysis of data from complex probability samples.
• I have written a book on survey analysis, published by Wiley.

Teaching | Current

• STATS 765 S1 2020 (with Lisa Chen)
• STATS 763 S1 2020 (with Alain Vandal)

Postgraduate supervision

Potential student projects

• Likelihood of the empirical distribution function as an approach to Bayesian analysis of survey data.
• Mixed models under complex sampling -- and maybe network models, too
• Survey software: design and implementation of various things for the survey package in R or for database backends. Graphics, probability distributions, regression models, multivariate methods...
• Multiple imputation: implementing more general analysis rules than Rubin's, graphics and exploration
• Multiple response data: how to work with them in R

Distinctions/Honours

Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand
Fellow of the American Statistical Association